Momaday the Way to Rainy Mountain

¶ … Rainy Mountain Memory and its preservation have always played an important role in man's life. Memories make him a unique person, different from others because of his different and unique life experiences, and for this reason preservation of memory is an important concern especially where their evaporation is a constant threat. In cultures and societies, where old traditions are rapidly being replaced by new values and beliefs, it is considered important to preserve memories of the days gone by. However people differ in the way they choose to preserve memories.

In our modern life, we choose to protect our important memories by video taping important occasions. However the same technological facilities were unavailable to older generations and for them, the most important preservation method was story telling. People would preserve their traditions by orally transporting their stories from one generation to another. However these oral traditions have now been replaced by literary narratives that are available to us in the form of literature.

Momaday's "The Way to Rainy Mountain" is one such commendable attempt of the author to preserve memory by writing it down in detail. The method Momaday uses is description whereby the author describes everything in great detail so as to preserve the rapidly evaporating reservoir of memories that were once the trademark of Kiowa culture. While the description method may have its flaws and may appear incoherent at times, it is still more reliable a method of preserving memory than story telling, even if far less absorbing.

In this paper, we shall only focus on the introduction to her book, The Way to Rainy Mountain and see how the author uses description to protect her cultural traditions, which might go into oblivion if not preserved. It is important to understand that in this introduction, the author has focused primarily on his grandmother and the way she remembers her. While describing the kind of person she was, Momaday also discusses various traditions of Kiowa people that were once the main characteristics of Kiowa culture.

The author has tried to lay more emphasis on the traditions that were immensely important and occupied central position in oral narratives. Her description is personal, coming right from her mind and has not been polluted with documented facts and figures of Kiowa culture. Momaday has tried her best to use the kind of description that closely resembles oral narrative. Eight children were there at play, seven sisters and their brother. Suddenly the boy was struck dumb; he trembled and began to run upon his hands and feet.

His fingers became claws, and his body was covered with fur. Her description style is full of formal variations to highlight the significance of traditions, which were important in Kiowa culture. We can easily detect the variation in description used by the author to accentuate the importance of traditions that Kiowa people considered sacred: They acquired Tai-me, the sacred Sun Dance doll, from that moment the object and symbol of their worship, and so shared in the divinity of the sun.

Not least, they acquired the sense of destiny, therefore courage and pride. When they entered upon the southern Plains they had been transformed. No longer were they slaves to the simple necessity of survival; they were a lordly and dangerous society of fighters and thieves, hunters and priests of the sun." Momaday is well aware of oral traditions and how they help us form memories. His description style for this reason retains the innocence and certain incoherency of oral tradition.

The author easily jumps from one story to another, which is usually the way oral narrative exists. These lines below, taken from the introduction, reveal the incoherency element of Momaday's description: Great green and yellow grasshoppers are everywhere in the tall grass, popping up like corn to sting the flesh, and tortoises crawl about on the red earth, going nowhere in the plenty of time. Loneliness is an aspect of the land.

All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man." Of course, these stories make sense but they are presented in non-sequential manner in order to retain the beauty of oral tradition that once defined the Kiowa culture. The gaps in description and the use of imagination are evident and they all bespeak of a long lost tradition of story telling when what really mattered was memory itself and not reality or accuracy.

Momaday doesn't expect us to believe all his stories because that he says is not the main purpose of preserving memory. In "The Man Made of Words," he explicitly wrote that the primary purpose of his description of memories was not to present reality but to re-create imagination in ink. The oral tradition is that process by which the myths, legends, tales, and lore of a people are formulated, communicated, and preserved in language by word of mouth, as opposed to writing..

We are concerned here not so much with an acute representation of actuality, but with the realization of the imaginative experience... Generally speaking, man has consummate being in language, and there only. The state of human being is an idea, an idea which man has of himself. Only when he is embodied in an idea, and the idea.